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Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

For 5 years in a row, screech owls nested in our owl box every spring. Watching them raise their chicks was an annual delight. But then they stopped coming, and for the past 2 years, no owls, which bummed me out.

It’s nesting season again, and I’ve been on the lookout for any sign of an owl. Three days ago, as I was trimming bamboo canes in the back garden, I looked up and spotted something small and gray amid the leaves.

An owl! It was as unperturbed as I was elated. Could it be the male of a mated pair, with his missus in the owl box sitting on a clutch of eggs?

I worked in the garden all day, as the owl slept in the swaying bamboo, occasionally peeping through half-closed eyes to keep an eye on me. And then I heard it: a soft, sweet trill, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, from inside the owl box — a nesting female! — which was immediately answered by the male owl in the bamboo. She called to him throughout the afternoon, and he answered each time. (Click here for audio of a screech owl’s monotonic trill, “the tremolo used by pairs.”)

At dusk, she appeared in the doorway — a rufous (red) screech owl, waiting for her mate to bring her dinner while she stayed with the eggs. I’ve named the pair Lucy and Desi (a cultural reference sadly lost on our young-adult kids). Just last week I saw a great horned owl in one of our trees, a known predator of the tiny screech owl, so I hope they have their guard up. If all goes well, I look forward to seeing fuzzy chick faces peeping out of the owl box in another month.

If you’re curious about the owl box, my husband made it from plans he found online (you can buy one ready-made too). Screech owls naturally nest in tree cavities, but they readily accept owl boxes. Last year, to make it more difficult for squirrels to get in and out of the box, thinking that might be why the owls were staying away, we sheathed it in galvanized tin. The metal skin also deters their destructive gnawing. We spray-painted it brown to blend in with the trees. It seems to have worked.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
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Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

I’ve been all over town at Austin’s wonderful nurseries this past week, shoulder-to-shoulder with other spring-crazy gardeners snapping up new plants to freshen up the garden and replace goners zapped by winter’s deep freezes. While I was after plants or soil for the most part, I couldn’t resist a few items from Tillery Street Plant Company‘s beautiful new gift shop.

To pay for your plants, you must walk this gauntlet (the shop interior) of small pots, tillandsias and other houseplants, and even cactus earrings. I meant to buy a pair but forgot.

I did find a few gift items though. And of course while I was there I hit up East Austin Succulents, right next door, and found even more good stuff.

And these ceramic succulents — or flowers. They call them corals. I bought quite a few of these last year and display them on a tabletop, although I do have one hanging on a wall among my squid planters.

A collection of metal agaves, yuccas, and barrel cactus caught my eye. These are quite nice. While I wouldn’t plant a whole garden of metal plants, one makes a striking accent amid other plants or in a pot.

I also love these chunky metal hearts, circles, and spirals. It can be hard to find contemporary garden art, but these are great. They sit on sturdy stakes pushed into the ground. I think they’d be nice in a pot or a garden bed.

HCWG really does have one of the best garden art selections in the Austin area.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

Spring looks a lot like fall in my garden, as this photo shows: fresh green leaves surrounded by brown live oak leaves. Live oaks stay green all winter, like an evergreen tree, but come spring they do actually drop their leaves and swiftly leaf out again. Casting off thousands (millions?) of leathery leaves, which turn brown right before they drop, live oaks make a total mess of my spring garden — and indeed my entire neighborhood and the entire city of Austin.

Yet who can begrudge the live oaks their moment to glow green with fresh new leaves, echoing all the spring growth at their feet? I’ve got volunteer Texas bluebonnets coming up in the gravel of the dry creek, washed here by last summer’s rain showers. I can’t wait to see them bloom, but their white-edged and -eyed leaves are pretty too.

The Japanese maple sports tender new chartreuse leaves, while brown live oak leaves pile up at its feet, fill the dry creek, and try to smother the recently cut-back sedges.

At least on the porch I can mostly keep the live oak leaves at bay, although I spy a few in the foxtail fern’s pot.

In the side yard, Mediterranean fan palm’s evergreen leaves neatly shed most of the live oak litter. (But wait until the pollen drop comes, snicker the live oaks.)

But — the horror! This is why we take photos of our gardens, y’all: to see what we’ve grown blind to. I seldom spend time in this stretch of the side garden, which is on the far side of the house, and yet how did I fail to notice how weedy it’s become? The liriope that’s straggling up through this entire bed was here when we moved in, but during the drought years it struggled and then disappeared. But not for good, and now it’s infiltrating my garden. I need to dig this whole area up, weed out the liriope to the roots, and replant the prickly pear, gopher plant, and Mexican feathergrass.

I need to cleanse my eyeballs after that, so here’s a peek at the pink-blooming ‘Traveller’ weeping redbud. New leaves of ‘Peter’s Purple’ monarda and ‘Katie’ ruellia are just coming up around it, and that’s a ‘Plum’ loropetalum beside it, also flowering.

‘Bright Edge’ yucca is looking stripey and stunning, as usual. Note the live oaks leaves. They are everywhere except in the trees, y’all.

The “leaves” of the bottle tree never change. I’ve been moving around various pieces of garden art this spring, and I relocated the ocotillo bottle tree to the lower garden, where it’s flanked by a quintet of upright ‘Will Fleming’ yaupon hollies. It doesn’t catch as much sunlight down here, but I like the way the bottles give color to this shady spot. ‘Tangerine Beauty’ crossvine is adding a bit of spring color as well.

This is my March post for Foliage Follow-Up. Fellow bloggers, what leafy loveliness is happening in your garden this month? Please join me in giving foliage its due on the day after Bloom Day. Leave a link to your post in a comment below. I’d appreciate it if you’ll also link to my post in your own — sharing link love! I look forward to seeing your foliage faves.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

It’s Bloom Day, and Austin is abloom right now in Texas mountain laurel grapiness.

Grapiness, you ask? Yes! Purple blossoms that draw comparisons to wisteria hang from every glossy-leaved branch and scent the air with the fragrance of grape Kool-Aid. It’s magical when Texas mountain laurels (Sophora secundiflora) are in bloom across the city, brightening even pedestrian parking lots.

This is the flowering tree that made me fall in love with Austin during a springtime house-hunting trip 23 years ago.

Every time I walk by one I have to stick my nose in the flowers and inhale.

Last year’s crop of red seeds lay strewn in the gravel under one tree. They’re pretty, like red beads, but toxic if eaten.

This office parking lot on Far West Boulevard went all-in with Texas mountain laurels in their landscaping, and the effect when they bloom is like floating in a grape-soda-scented cloud.

Dazzling!

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

I’m also appreciating new foliage on ‘Marvel’ mahonia, a trial plant from Southern Living Plant Collection that I received last fall.

I’m growing it in a pot for now, but this mahonia can get big — to 6 feet tall! — so I will probably plant it in the ground next winter.

I’ve been working like a madwoman in the garden this week, taking full advantage of the perfect gardening weather. Today I cleaned out the stock-tank pond and planted a 15-gallon Mexican plum (Prunus mexicana), one of my favorite spring-flowering native trees. It looks awfully small, but I sure had to dig a big hole for it! It’s sweet to look over there and see it blooming, and I’m relieved to have something hardy here to fill this hole, vacated two years ago by the stunning but winter-hating Mexican weeping bamboo. I held out for a year, hoping it would come back, but today I dug up only a small bit of it that survived our Arctic blasts and just stuck it in a pot. I’ll always love you, Mexican weeping bamboo, but you just aren’t dependable.

I got the Mexican plum at Barton Springs Nursery, and when I was leaving I spotted this only-in-Austin motorbike with steer horns. Ride ’em, cowboy or cowgirl!

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

Fiddle-dee-dee! It’s looking ferny around here. River fern (Thelypteris kunthii) fiddleheads are popping up beneath the Japanese maple, right on schedule.

Unfurling into shepherds’ hooks, the fronds will soon fill out and add springtime lushness to the shade garden.

The spiraling fiddleheads are so freaking cute!

They look like butterfly tongues.

Above the ferns, the Japanese maple unfurls its own beautiful leaves.

And evergreen Carolina jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens) is in full, fragrant bloom on the back fence.

So sweetly scented

Even the neighborhood does will be “unfurling” their own little fawns soon. I glimpsed this one behind the fence, browsing among last season’s inland sea oats, maybe looking for acorns.

Outside the fence is close enough to suit this gardener.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

One of the few things I didn’t plant in my garden, the Mexican buckeye (Ungnadia speciosa) came with the house. When I first saw the buckeye-shaped seedpods dangling from its branches, I was excited to realize I’d inherited this small native tree. That first fall, its yellowing foliage lit up the lower garden near the back fence.

Its spring beauty is more ephemeral and dainty but welcome all the same. Petal-pink flowers dangle from raspberry stems arrayed along the branches, competing with unfurling bronze-green leaves that refuse to wait for the blooms to finish first.

Unlike the showy loropetalum, Mexican buckeye demands you get up close to really appreciate its delicate spring beauty.

Honeybees have been doing just that…

…buzzing in and out of the flowers to collect pollen.

Here you can see one of last season’s “buckeye” seedpods.

Blue-green Yucca rostrata makes a complementary backdrop too.

One more — the flowers are just so pretty this year! And I like knowing they’re feeding the bees.

And because we’re here, let’s take a moment to admire the decidedly less dainty — in fact, screaming pink — loropetalum again. It’s certainly been a great spring for these nonnative but well adapted shrubs.

Delicate or as loud as a banshee, I’m happy to have these spring flowers in my largely shady garden.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

Resembling squares of lime, cherry, berry blue, and grape Jell-O, the glass-block windows of artist Ellsworth Kelly’s new artwork, Austin, are colorful, playful, and flat-out fun. You kind of want to slurp them up, or stick your finger in them to see if they jiggle.

A new and buzzed-about addition to the Blanton Museum collection on the University of Texas campus, Austin is a chapel-like structure designed by Kelly three decades ago for a private collector. It was never built, and Kelly never designed another structure. (He’s known primarily for his Color Field paintings and minimalist sculptures.) And then somehow it found a home — and funding — at UT, and Kelly consulted on its construction before he died, in 2015, at age 92 — 3 years before its completion.

It opened in February, and I’ve been eager to visit, having read articles about it in the New York Times and other publications. Last Friday I purchased my ticket at the Blanton and saw it for myself.

The smooth, curving limestone exterior resembles an igloo to many observers.

Kelly was an atheist, and Austin is a secular structure — a temple of light and color rather than of God.

And yet it pays homage to the religious iconography of churches: their stained-glass windows (Austin has three made of colored glass), Stations of the Cross (Kelly’s are black-and-white marble panels hung along the interior walls), and altar cross (Kelly’s is an 18-foot-tall redwood totem sculpture).

Surprisingly, there is no seating inside, no benches from which to contemplate the prism-like light smeared across the walls and floor. You must stand and look.

Like a contemporary rose window, tumbling squares of colored glass illuminate one wing of the structure.

A many-pointed star is formed by the negative space inside the colored squares.

Opposite, a sunburst shape transforms sunlight into an aurora-like glow on the barrel-vaulted ceiling.

Back outside, I sat for a few minutes under the arcade of the Blanton and contemplated Austin. Aesthetically, I prefer the exterior of the building, with that beautiful smooth and curving limestone, to the minimalist interior. But the interior light patterns are intriguing, and it would be fascinating to see how the light and refracted color change throughout the day and the seasons. Lucky UT students who get to visit for free whenever the mood strikes them!

While I was on the UT campus, I also checked out this gravity-defying canoe sculpture, Monochrome for Austin by artist Nancy Rubins. What do you think it most resembles: a floral-like canoe bouquet or a rush-hour pile-up on the lake?

It reminds me of the old Waterloo Ice House on 38th Street, which for years was adorned with canoes hung on the outside of the building — a reminder of Austin’s beloved Barton Creek and Lady Bird Lake. Likewise, these canoes also evoke Lady Bird Lake for me, and I feel the sculpture would be more at home in downtown overlooking the lake.

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.

‘Sizzling Pink’ loropetalum is still sizzling in the lower garden and knocking my socks off every time I look at it. Yesterday the sun was lighting up those fuchsia blooms like a stained-glass window.

The fringey flowers look like the pom-poms of a thousand cheerleaders.

So colorful!

Amid my shade garden’s quieter blue-greens and dusty greens, it stands out in a big way.

If I squint, it reminds me of springtime azaleas, which I took for granted growing up in the Deep South.

But I actually like these calamari-shaped flowers better. I also love the way the flowery branches layer themselves all the way to the ground.

Cosmo agrees. We’re both gaga over it right now!

I welcome your comments; please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading this in a subscription email, click here to visit Digging and find the comment box at the end of each post.
_______________________

Digging Deeper: News and Upcoming Events

Calling all garden bloggers! You’re invited to register for the annual Garden Bloggers Fling tour and meetup, which will be held in Austin this May 3rd-6th! Click this link for information about registering, and you can see our itinerary here. Space is limited, so don’t delay. The 2018 Fling will be the event’s 10th anniversary, which started in Austin in 2008.

Join the mailing list for Garden Spark Talks! Inspired by the idea of house concerts, I’m hosting a series of garden talks by inspiring designers and authors out of my home. Talks are limited-attendance events and generally sell out within just a few days, so join the Garden Spark email list for early notifications. Simply click this link and ask to be added.